LONG BLOG

I hate people who post ‘gamer logic’ pictures. Quite a bit. “Hey, did you know the police will give up on chasing you after 50 feet? Lol, not like real life at all” “Falls into hay off Empire State Building. Survives”. Shut up. No one cares. Games are about fun, not realism. Any game that sacrifices fun for being realistic has failed as entertainment, in my mind. Take for instance, Receiver: a first person shooter where you have to reload in a real fashion. As a thought experiment, it is really fun. PvP in the game would be a wonderful fustercluck. The novelty is interesting, but the actual gameplay is less entertaining, than say, pressing R then continuing to shoot stuff. I think FarCry handled it very well, but on the fly, brutal self surgeries, but still keeping pace.

Whoa dude, you are soooooo right! I can never play Mario the same way again! But seriously, headbutt a bullet.

So why do I bring all this up? Well, I have one complaint that actually does drive me crazy about videogames. It’s like some weird kind of fear. And that is that I am almost never standing on solid ground. Ever. I am playing a game in a papercraft diorama of what a real world situation might look like.

For anyone who has played Dark Souls on PC, you may be familiar with the DSFix mod. One aspect is that you can unlock the frame rate which comes with the ominous message that you ‘may’ fall through the floor on occasion. And that is genuinely what happens. Instead of sliding down a ladder and having your feet touch ground, your slide shreds the paper flood beneath you as you descend into the dark void.

Thanks to the Game Grumps I now know how flimsy the world of Skyrim is. Everything in the game is paper thin. The floors. The walls. Mountains. Stairs. Other humans. There are no guts...no brains...just a shell with facial muscles, eyes, and teeth. Some kind of walking talking flesh heap. But even worse, these systems allow the player to abuse these systems by the use of a bowl...you can literally use a bowl to walk through walls, falling through the abyss and seeing the darkness of the world outside of your doll house. It’s just...creepy.

Almost every game where you are playing in a 3D environment has the same situation. You can often tell this just by moving the camera so that it clips through the one dimensional layer. Behind every brick is just another flat surface. No dirt. No minerals. No fossils. Just...nothing. Its like walking on ice.

Oh yeah, thats the good stuff.

So this explains why it is so comforting to me when the games let me know what is around me. Minecraft is a fantastic example. Every single structure is actually made up of blocks. You start on grass, but you can see the feet of dirt, stone, and eventually bedrock beneath you, and even if you find a gap in the bedrock, you just fall into the core of the earth and die. It almost makes sense in that regard. Terraria uses the same system, so it is also nice to see that other people share my odd phobia. As far as the people, there have been some fairly good advances in this as well! Most zombie games at least recognize that humans are made up of 4 limbs, a torso, and a head with a brain. Sniper Elite even goes a step further and fills in the remaining organs and bones, and even shows how people die as your bullets rip through their organs. The entry and exit wounds leave something to be desired, but remember what I was saying above about reality? Bloody gaping wounds followed by muffled screaming? Not fun. There are also the new Mortal Kombat games which used the XRay system to show the damage that was done. Was it exclusive to a QTE? Sure. But it helped to...flesh out the world.

I was musing on this a bit, and I realized that only modern games have this problem. See, back in the good old days of the NES and SNES, a few bricks were reserved for the ground. Mario had a brick and a half beneath his feet. Even if, for some reason, he jumped super hard, he would still have a lot of brick to go through. Even Simon Belmont had a good block beneath his feet most of the time.